Thoughts of Beginnings
„To see what is right, and not to do it, is want of courage “
The Analects of Confucius
There’s something appealing about a fresh start. It’s why we can be good at New Year’s Resolutions that last until late January, leaving those hopes — frozen out on a shelf, to be dusted off towards the end of December.
I’ve started many times. I started again today. The first thing you need to do, don’t they say, to be a writer, is to write. Amid my increased reading (and I will come back to that at another point), I have thought
‘What do I need to know, to write well or well better?’
‘Why can’t I motivate myself without learning or feeling that I am doing this well?’
On that note, I started to write this morning. While I don’t think ‘tools’ are crucial and have been, for the most part, a distraction to me, I am using Craft to write out these posts but despite a penchant for Scrivener, am finding it more refreshing, for the moment, at least, to write using Word.
I worry about structure but at the beginning there isn’t much structure to worry about. I am still not sure if I am going to veer more to fiction or non-fiction but am starting with some memories and snapshots of my working life, meditations, thoughts and reflections.
In my mind, I have the idea of melding a few of my interests and experiences. Not fiction but not entirely non-fiction either. I’d love to explore, for example, philosophy and different philosophical traditions in a background of my social work practice — not a text book, but perhaps, a polemic. We often talk, rightly about ethics in social work, and mental health practice — but maybe we can also learn from differing models of epistemology, aesthetics — even — or perhaps, especially logic. Is this something that offers anything new? I don’t think it needs to, as my focus, at the moment, is entirely on writing something for me — doing something with these thoughts that I am stringing together.
On that note, I am focussing my reading on philosophy at the moment and may write more about that and the impact the reading has had on my thinking, spurring me to pull thoughts together. I am gathering quotations and making notes of my thinking as it links both to my practice knowledge and the twenty odd years I have of doing social work, and my theoretical knowledge, the reading I continue to do to push my practice and my thinking, further.
They may meld into something more substantial at some point and I am sure I will share a snippet or two, not because I think they are anything close to audience-ready, but to test myself and my mettle. Am I willing to put my thoughts ‘out there’?
I’m also pretty comfortable at the moment that there are few readers here. I’m not really seeking an audience. I’ve written for audiences before and you can become, quickly, very aware of your own influence and it can have negative implications on one’s ego, or that’s how I felt it was for me.
